Readingshttp://www.sonicacts.com/2015/conference
The conference was called The Geologic Imagination (I’ll bring the book with me), the discussion was around geology and the Anthropocene and the way that sound artists respond to the different modes of the Anthropocene (geological, sublime, technological, warfare, screens, climate change)

http://rebeccasolnit.net/book/a-paradise-built-in-hell/
Rebecca Solnit’s book is a journalistic examination of the different ways that people responded to catastrophe. It has some harrowing stories and some very familiar moments. Its very much about humans and societies and communities.

http://fordhampress.com/index.php/subjects/political-theory/after-fukushima-paperback.html
Nancy’s book is one of the first theoretical books to come out after Fukushima. It is a short (but extended) meditation on the meaning of equivalence, and argues that there is not such thing as an isolated natural disaster anymore. He says that everything is interconnected (this is the meaning of equivalence he uses) that there is not a natural disaster without a technological disaster, an economic disaster and a social disaster. It is very short and really helped me understand some of the work I’ve been doing on machines and nature.

The ADA reader! Remedial reading for me, since I’m coming a little from outside the digital arts community. Be gentle.

I just read Fredric Jameson in the latest New Left Review: https://newleftreview.org/II/95/fredric-jameson-on-re-reading-life-and-fate
Jameson is a touchstone for me in terms of style and dialectic. Even though this is literary criticism, and of a book I haven’t read (tho I might one day) he gets to some great places in terms of what can be imagined aesthetically in a wrecked city (Stalingrad!).

Tung-Hui Hu, A Prehistory of the Cloud: https://mitpress.mit.edu/prehistory-cloud
Stumbled on this, and was expecting yet another ‘material nature of the internet’ thingamy, but this is more interesting – doesn’t fetishise the wires and servers or the virtual spaces, but talks about the cultural genealogies of network technology. Not sure if it’s of any direct relevance but great background/perspective reading.

McKenzie Wark’s Molecular Red http://www.versobooks.com/books/1886-molecular-red
I haven’t read his Hacker Manifesto, which should be more relevant I guess. But I’ve been interested in all the environmental humanities stuff lately – all the themes about living after the catastrophe (especially in Timothy Morton). The idea that everything is connected is also both a network and an environmental idea, though different in each case and I suspect truer in the latter (Tung-Hui does mention that it’s also the definition of paranoia…). Wark has great chapters especially on Bogdanov (I’m also passingly interested in Russian Futurism, Soviet science and Biocosmism) and Harraway/Barad etc. It also sent me off to read Platonov. There’s a chapter on Kim Stanley Robinson, whom I’ve also been reading lately.

China Mielville’s The City and the City is a really central novel for me being about Christchurch without at all being about Christchurch. I read it before the quakes, but afterwards it became a frame for thinking about the way Christchurch became 2 or 3 cities layered on top of each other – the past, remembered, city, the present destroyed city, and the future imagined city. The present and the past were the tangible layers, and the experience of post-quake Christchurch was, and maybe still is, an experience of living between what you can see and what you remember. In the novel people are not allowed to ‘see’ the other city intertwined with their own city, and that’s how it felt here for a while as well – but more a sense that I couldn’t let myself see the old city amongst the destroyed ‘real’ city.http://www.postmodernmystery.com/the_city_and_the_city.html

TV / Documentary:
Treme, David Simon’s wonderful show on post-katrina New Orleans. The first season was particularly resonant here – the sounds of helicopters, the USAR markings on buildings, the plywood over windows, the way people wait for and celebrate businesses re-opening, and every conversation begins with ‘how much water did you take?’ for the flood level in New Orleans, like accounts of damage here, and the unfolding stories of where people were in the disaster. The scale of Katrina dwarfs Chch in human and built terms, but Treme felt like documentary from here.http://www.hbo.com/tremehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2jnSzAI3gCQ

Then the recent documentary on transitional projects, the Art of Recovery, which is a feel good booster of the most high profile responses to the earthquakes and recovery, with some solid critique of the top-down planning process vs the people as wellhttp://artofrecoveryfilm.com

Analysis:
Su has already mentioned Rebecca Solnit’s ‘A Paradise Built in Hell’ which was a key text here in the year or so after february – it was on high rotation in the public library and name checked several times in The Press around the time I was reading it. See also: Naomi Klein The Shock Doctrine which is too depressingly accurate here (i.e. school closures, continued assaults on local democracy, etc)http://rebeccasolnit.net/book/a-paradise-built-in-hell/http://www.naomiklein.org/shock-doctrine

The Villa on the edge of the Empire: One Hundred ways to Read a City
Fiona Farrell’s account of the earthquakes and aftermath. I had to read it slowly because it made me so angry and sad all at the same time, so it captures much of the post-quake emotion of Christchurch, and includes really interesting comparisons with L’Aquila. At the Writers’ fest in september I went to a panel discussion on ‘Imaginary Cities’ including Fiona Farrell, Urban Designer Hugh Nicholson, and Novelists Anna Smaill and Hamish Clayton. It was too short to develop the theme very far, but demonstrated the deeply felt resonance of imagining cities in Christchurch now.http://www.stuff.co.nz/the-press/christchurch-life/70245231/Christchurch-rebuild-Welcome-to-Brownleegrad

Once in a Lifetime, City building after Disaster in Christchurch
The definitive analysis of city-building and post-disaster urban recovery in christchurch, from many different perspectives.http://onceinalifetime.org.nz

Earth Sound Earth Signal is a study of energies in aesthetics and the arts, from the birth of modern communications in the nineteenth century to the global transmissions of the present day. Douglas Kahn begins by evoking the Aeolian sphere music that Henry David Thoreau heard blowing along telegraph lines and the Aelectrosonic sounds of natural radio that Thomas Watson heard through the first telephone; he then traces the histories of science, media, music, and the arts to the 1960s and beyond. Earth Sound Earth Signal rethinks energy at a global scale, from brainwaves to outer space, through detailed discussions of musicians, artists and scientists such as Alvin Lucier, Edmond Dewan, Pauline Oliveros, John Cage, James Turrell, Robert Barry, Joyce Hinterding, and many others.

Global environmental change, argues Michel Serres, has forced us to reconsider our relationship to nature. In this translation of his influential 1990 book Le Contrat Naturel, Serres calls for a natural contract to be negotiated between Earth and its inhabitants.

While destruction as a theme can be traced throughout art history, from the early atomic age it has remained a pervasive and compelling element of contemporary visual culture. Damage Control features the work of more than 40 international artists working in a range of media – painting, sculpture, photography, film, installation and performance – who have used destruction as a means of responding to their historical moment and as a strategy for inciting spectacle and catharsis, as a form of rebellion and protest, or as an essential part of re-creation and restoration.

I’ve been tinkering with accelerometers the last couple of weeks so just thought I’d put this in as a flag for technical implementations of sensor networks – I’d like to consider instrumentation in relation to the world.

This publication is a companion to a number of artworks, (a list of which can be found towards the end of this book) which have been produced so as to conduct this research project through art. They embody and emphasize aspects of this thesis in various ways. The texts in this book take the form of correspondence with those people who took part in artworks over the course of this three year project, and who have been significant interlocutors in the thinking of this thesis. They are arranged thematically to address conventional aspects of research, such as methodological concerns, ethical considerations, and accounts of specific artworks discussed in relation to theoretical concepts.

Helen Moore

My reading/viewing lately has been eclectic, although it would be no surprise that there’s an ongoing thread that tends to follow up provocations that the Christchurch context throws up … and that often provide lens on our human relationship(s) with the natural and material worlds, and the tensions between citizen and government led ‘recovery’ … consequently my ‘list’ has many overlaps with texts that Zita shared …

A recent commentator role at a performing arts gathering in Northern Japan (place of the 3/11 triple disaster) , led me to delve further into themes under investigation there such as … the body in crisis, pilgrimage, place, spirituality, the response of artists to catastrophe post World War ll (eg Hijikata Tatsumi, founder of Butoh dance), and following 3/11

Tracey Benson
My list is a combination of books I would like to read and some that I have already started (that are on my kindle). Broadly speaking I am drawn to texts about place, storytelling and mapping cultural experience.

Rob CarterI really like the video you posted, i’m often unsure how I relate to academia / science / art, so it was nice to see poets and creative writers represented . Many times my thinking is influenced by scientific processes / people. I’m lucky in that I can go ask my friendly local scientist about earthquakes for example.